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0.8.3 Released

No real earth shattering news here, but there were a number of really annoying issues involving other libraries that RubyGems depends upon. 0.8.3 contains some workarounds for these issues. In particular:

  • Added workaround for the null byte in Dir string issue. (see http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/121702). (Thanks to Mauricio Fernández for the quick response on this one).
  • Added workaround for old version of Zlib on windows that caused Ruwiki to fail to install. (see http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/121770)
  • Added workaround for large YAML file issues. (We dynamically cut down the size of the source index YAML file and seem to have worked around immediate issues.

There has been some minor usability enhancements and changes …

  • A user specific source index cache can be used when the site-wide cache is unwritable (i.e. because you are running as a non-admin). This greatly speeds up gem commands run in non-admin mode when the site-wide cache is out of date.
  • The gem command now used an HTTP HEAD command to detect if the server’s source index needs to be downloaed.
  • gem check gemname –test will run unit tests on installed gems that have unit tests.
  • Multiple gem names are allowed on the gem install command line. This means you can do:

    gem install rake rails needle postgres-pr pimki

    (Ok, you get the idea)

  • Multiple authors my be specified in a Gem spec.
  • Switched to using setup.rb (rather than a custom install script) for the installation of RubyGems itself. If you have installed RubyGems before, double check the installation instructions and make sure you use setup.rb instead of install.rb.
  • Ryan Davis has provided a patch so you can use an env variable (GEM_SKIP), to tell loadpath_manager not to load gems of those names. This was useful for him while testing libs that he had in development.
fred, the rubygems robot